Was Andrei Tarkovsky killed by the KGB?
There’s no doubt that Andrei Tarkovsky remains one of the most significant directors of all time and is arguably Russia’s most prominent name in cinema. His films, including Andrei Rublev, Solaris and Stalker, often examine themes of the spiritual and the metaphysical in a gloriously unique narrative style.
Tarkovsky’s final film, 1986’s The Sacrifice, is, in fact, something of a rumination on the inevitable and impending nature of death. The director himself had once claimed to have no fear of dying and the belief that he was immortal in a making-of documentary on his final work, but later that year, he was diagnosed with lung cancer.
The Russian film icon did not make it to the end of the year, and in his final diary entry, made on December 15th, he wrote, “Now I have no strength left – that is the problem”. The lung cancer came on quickly and took Tarkovsky’s life even more, leading some to question whether Tarkovsky’s illness had been more sinister.
In the early 1990s, a conspiracy theory emerged that suggested that Tarkovsky did not, in fact, die from natural causes but had been assassinated by the KGB. The evidence for this claim is limited, as is often the case with most conspiracy theories, but it surrounds certain testimonies.
Those testimonies were said to have been given by former KGB agents who claim that the Soviet public official, security administrator and head of the KGB between December 1982 and October 1988, Viktor Chebrikov, had given the order to take out Tarkovsky as part of a Soviet government programme to eradicate anti-Soviet propaganda.
After the failed 1991 Soviet coup, in which Communist Party hardliners tried to take control of Russia from Mikhail Gorbachev, certain documents were said to have surfaced in which one of the doctors who treated Tarkovsky in his final days said that his cancer did not merely arrive from natural causes.
Whether or not Tarkovsky was indeed a target of the KGB largely lies in the fact that he, his wife Larisa, the actor Anatoly Solonitsyn, known for his frequent collaborations with the director, all died from the same kind of lung cancer, a tragic coincidence which led to some people suggestion poisoning or sabotage.
Vladimir Sharun, the sound designer from Stalker, has suggested, however, that the three parties had been poisoned by a nearby chemical plant where the film was shot. Of course, in the age of an online world, conspiracy theories are more contagious than ever before. While the inner details of Tarkovsky’s death will likely never come to fruition, the loss of an iconic artist so quickly after diagnosis will remain a tragedy.
